And while mobile robots usually have wheels to get around, one very special robot has proven that you don’t need wheels to get around. HitchBot has been hitchhiking its way across Germany this month, visiting Neuschwanstein Castle, joining the Rose Monday Parade in Cologne, and crashing a wedding near Frankfurt. Now safely back in Munich with some of its creators, we are sure that HitchBot has already started to plan its next adventure.

Fire fighting bots and other robots for good

February saw the release of a video showing a humanoid robot on board a US Navy ship extinguishing an actual fire. The adult-sized “SAFFiR” robot, built by students from Virginia Tech, could walk, stop, turn, locate the heat source of a fire behind a door, and (once the door opened) take a hose and blast the flames with water, all without falling or stopping. And in a related project CMU researches released details of an autonomous drone that can fly through narrow, dark and smoke-filled corridors to map fires and find victims. The drone and SAFFiR could, in future, be linked up as a team to support human fire fighters.

You may recall that AI was a hot topic last month at the World Economic Forum in Davos. Some videos from this event were released on YouTube this month, including one with Ken Goldberg – don’t miss Audrow Nash’s interview with Ken, where he describes his impressions of the event.